Therapeutic Target Discovery

A major obstacle for treating cancer is a lack of precision medicines. Many potential targeted therapies fail to transition from preclinical models to patients due to incomplete knowledge of the drug’s mechanism of action and/or absence of robust biomarkers to identify relevant patient populations. The Target Discovery arm of the Cancer Dependency Map project aims to provide the oncology community with potential drug targets that have a high likelihood of success.

Our strategy is to find biomarkers that predict sensitivity to genetic or chemical perturbations. Investigating these relationships can lead to mechanistic understanding of the vulnerability, from which one can form therapeutic hypotheses and determine which targets are most likely to translate to patient tumors.

As part of this effort, you will work with some of the largest experimental cancer biology datasets in the world, including the Project Achilles genome-wide CRISPR screens and the PRISM Repurposing screens.

Drug repurposing analytics

Drug repurposing offers an opportunity for rapid clinical translation of drugs that have already been optimized and proven safe in humans, circumventing a costly and slow drug discovery process. The Broad Repurposing Hub has developed the world’s foremost library of clinical drugs, and we have recently shown that high-throughput screening of these drugs across hundreds of well-characterized cancer cell lines allows for discovery of novel anti-cancer efficacy of even non-oncology drugs.

These large-scale drug screening data present many analytical challenges, and unlocking their potential requires deep integration with genomic and molecular characterization of the cancer cell lines, genome-wide measurements of their genetic vulnerabilities, as well as clinical and other datasets. As we expand the scale of this Drug Repurposing resource, we are looking for skilled data scientists, computational biologists, and machine learning practitioners to join the Cancer Data Science team and help lead data-driven discovery of new precision cancer therapeutics.

Cancer Dependency Map Genomics

The success of cancer precision medicine requires the ability to determine optimal treatments given the molecular information encoded in each patient’s tumor. The Broad Institute’s ambitious Cancer Dependency Map initiative (https://depmap.org) aims to create a comprehensive laboratory-based map of vulnerabilities across pediatric and adult tumors in service of facilitating biological discovery and advancing precision medicine.

We are looking for a highly motivated and talented individual to lead the Cancer Dependency Map Genomics team as part of this ambitious initiative, creating and implementing a scientific vision to take the Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia (CCLE) effort to the next level.